Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet

“You’re missing out, Mr. Wong. I don’t know what Cookie put in these, but they’re pretty amazing.” I saluted the boxes that surrounded him, downed the last sip of margarita—or Cookie-a-rita, as they’d been recently dubbed—and decided to get a jump on my letter writing Gemma insisted upon as a form of therapy. Usually therapists stuck to journaling, so letter writing was an interesting twist.

I figured I’d write a letter to Santa. Christmas had come and gone, but I’d missed it, as I was not talking to anyone except for the salespeople for the Buy From Home Channel at the time, and they didn’t seem to want to spend Christmas with me.

I’d had Christmas dinner with Cookie and Amber, of course, and Gemma and Uncle Bob had both come by bearing gifts and a special, sticky kind of depression, but I really didn’t remember much beyond that. Though there was an incredible chocolate cheesecake somewhere in there. The rest was a blur.

I took out pen and paper and jotted down my thoughts.

Dear Santa,

What the f**k?

That was about all I could manage, and it got me nowhere fast. I felt no better for the effort. Gemma’s therapy techniques sucked. I still couldn’t get Reyes out of my head. The image of him letting Amber hug him was too precious. And not what I wanted. I wanted to be angry with him, to shake my fists and snarl, but he’d been fighting demons for me. To keep me safe. It was so freaking hard to stay angry with a guy who was secretly fighting a war in your honor. Damn it.

I herded Gemma to the bedroom and lay down beside her only to stare at the ceiling for two hours straight. Then the wall. The nightstand. The skull-clad tissue dispenser. After hours of nothing but frustration, I eased Gemma’s arm off my face and slipped out of bed. I was really hoping that margarita would help me sleep like it had Gemma and Cookie, but it didn’t. When I was trying to stay awake for weeks at a time, all I could do was drink copious amounts of coffee just to fight it off. Now I wanted to sleep and couldn’t.

The sandman was an ass.

I realized the one person missing from their little ambush was Garrett Swopes, a skiptracer who often worked with my uncle Bob. I hadn’t seen him since I almost got him killed. For the second time. But surely he wasn’t holding that against me. He hadn’t come by and I hadn’t had the desire or the energy to leave my apartment, so I hadn’t heard from him in two months. Not a phone call. Not a text. Not an email. Double gunshot wound or not, that just wasn’t like him.

I decided to hunt him down. He probably wasn’t the same since his near-death experience. He’d seen me. When he died on the operating table, he’d seen what I looked like from the other side, seen what I did on a daily basis. That had to be hard on anyone.

And yet I had no idea if he remembered it. As the escalator to Heaven, I had certain responsibilities that I’d tried to explain to him once. But seeing was believing. Maybe it pushed him over the edge. Maybe the reality was much more disturbing than the idea.

I pushed my feet into a pair of slippers, threw on a jacket, and headed that way.

Driving at three o’clock in the morning had its perks. Like little to no traffic, so I made it to Garrett’s house in record time.

I knocked on his door and waited. That man took forever to answer in the wee hours before dawn. I knocked again. I’d always wondered something: If a skiptracer is arrested and skips, who searches for him?

“Charles!” he growled from behind the door. “I swear to God if that’s you…”

How did he know? I decided not to say anything. To surprise him with my presence.

The door swung open and he stood there shirtless and disheveled. While I didn’t have a particular thing for Garrett, he did make a nice vision. He had mocha-colored skin and smoky gray eyes that alighted on Margaret but dismissed her just as quickly. He was in the biz. Surely he understood my need to pack iron even in my pajamas.

“What’s up?” I asked, way more cheerily than I felt.

“Are you kidding me?” He rubbed an eye with one hand.

“Nope.” I charged through him and went straight for his sofa. But his house was really dark. Weird. “I haven’t seen you in forever. I thought we should talk.”

“There is such a thing as being too presumptuous.”

“You know, I get that a lot. Got any coffee?”

After exhaling loudly so I wouldn’t miss his annoyance, he closed the door with more force than I felt necessary and strode to the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”

“Bugging you.”

“Besides that.”

“I didn’t realize I had to have a reason to visit one of my best friends on planet Earth.”

“Are you trying to stay awake for days at a time again?”

“Nope. Not trying. Just doing.”

He’d been rummaging around the kitchen, and while I couldn’t see what he was doing, the rummaging sounds stopped. I waited. Maybe it was the best-friend statement. Clearly he didn’t know he was one of my best friends. He must’ve felt really honored. Or horrified. It was a win–win.

“Here.”

I jumped. He was standing right behind me, handing me a wineglass. “You’re serving me coffee in a wineglass?”

“No.”

“Is this coffee-flavored wine?”

“No. Drink.” He tilted the glass toward my mouth.

I took a sip and … “Hey, that’s not bad.”

“Drink it all and I’ll give you a ride home.”